While focusing on topical environmental issues, students learn how to gather, analyze and present data using methods from the natural and social sciences. Data are drawn from multiple sources, including laboratory experiments, fieldwork, databases, archival sources, surveys and interviews. Emphasis is on quantitative analysis. Environmental topics vary in scale from the local to the global. Note: 202 must be taken concurrently. Prerequisite: 101. Enrollment limited to 18.

This course will explore the monstrosity of motherhood - the fear, disgust, alienation, and confusion of
both being a mother and having one. We will discuss literary and cinematic representations of mothers
as absent, distant, cruel, ambivalent, irresponsible, and deviant, and consider the ways we have been

What it would be like to hear the squirrel’s heartbeat, to open one’s mind fully to the sensations and impressions of the world around us? The image belongs to George Eliot, who in Middlemarch suggested we couldn’t bear it; we would die of a sensory overload, the “roar on the other side of silence.” The novelists of the generations that followed tried to live in that roar: to explore the stream of consciousness, to capture the way we make sense of experience and order out of our memory’s chaos. Readings in George Eliot, Henry James, Virginia Woolf and others.

Westudy key texts in the diverse tradition of 20th- and 21st-century South Asian literature in English, from the early poet Sarojini Naidu to internationally acclaimed contemporary global and diasporic writers from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal. Topics include: the postcolonial fashioning of identities; Independence and Partition; women’s interventions in nationalist discourses; the crafting of new English idioms; choices of genre and form; the challenges of historiography, trauma, memory; diaspora and the (re)making of “home;” life post-9/11 Islamophobia.

In this seminar, we trace the evolution of the legend of the greenwood outlaw with his merry men and (later) his intrepid ladylove, through medieval popular tale, ballad, drama, lyric, novel, and film—from first mention in the late Middle Ages to recent works and current events. Everyone knows the social bandit who robs from the rich and gives to the poor, hated by the authorities and loved by the people, but few have read the early formative texts that first inspired this unceasingly popular legend. We also explore and add to the rich legacy of Robin Hood criticism.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It, I Henry IV, Measure for Measure, King Lear, Macbeth,The Tempest, and Shakespeare's sonnets. Enrollment in each section limited to 25. Not open to first-year students.

Whether in fantasy or more mainstream narratives, storylines evolve in a carefully constructed world space. Imaginary settings—whether they be Narnia or New York— involve the creation of spatially coherent locations, a backstory and a world that is peopled.In this course, students examine fictional worlds and learn to build those worlds themselves.This class is not limited to but is recommended for students interested in fantasy, science fiction or speculative fiction: In this course, we explore the constructed worlds made by some wonderful writers and build fictional worlds of our own.

This course considers how literature represents environmental change and crisis, and shapes our understanding of the natural world. How can poetry provide new ways for thinking through extinction, conservation, and environmental justice? We explore these issues by reading a selection of environmental poetry in conversation with key texts from the environmental humanities.

An introductory exploration of the English language, its history, current areas of change and future. Related topics such as how dictionaries are made and the structure of the modern publishing industry. Students learn about editing, proofreading and page layout; the course also entails a comprehensive review of grammar and punctuation.

Topics course: Reading and discussion of all Waugh’s novels (and some of his travel-books and journalism), from his early satires of the 1920s and 30s such as Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies, through his turn to explicit religious polemic in Brideshead Revisited and Helena, to his re-creation of the Second World War in the trilogy Sword of Honour. By permission of the instructor. Enrollment limited to 12.